Change notification wrapper

Subscribing to change notifications of objects mostly results in large statements such as the one below:

var itemAsPropertyChanged = obj as INotifyPropertyChanged;
if (itemAsPropertyChanged != null)
{
    itemAsPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged += OnPropertyChanged;
}

However, using this code one must be aware that if not unsubscribed, there might be a potential memory leak here. In Catel, there is a solution for such cases that can raise change notifications using weak events called the ChangeNotificationWrapper. It allows the subscription of both the INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged interfaces.

 Subscribing to events of an observable object

Using the code below, one can subscribe to the PropertyChanged event of an object:

var wrapper = new ChangeNotificationWrapper(obj);
wrapper.PropertyChanged += OnPropertyChanged;

Note that it is not required to check whether the object implements INotifyPropertyChanged, the wrapper does it automatically

 Subscribing to events of an observable collection

Using the code below, one can subscribe to the CollectionChanged event of an object:

var wrapper = new ChangeNotificationWrapper(observableCollection);
wrapper.CollectionChanged += OnCollectionChanged;

Note that it is not required to check whether the object implements INotifyCollectionChanged, the wrapper does it automatically

Advanced scenario with observable collections

Sometimes it is required to watch both changes inside a collection, but also the items inside a collection. For example, there is a list of customers and you are also interested in changes of customers inside a collection. This is fully supported by the ChangeNotificationWrapper using the code below:

var wrapper = new ChangeNotificationWrapper(observableCustomerCollection);
wrapper.CollectionChanged += OnCollectionChanged;
wrapper.CollectionItemPropertyChanged += OnCollectionItemPropertyChanged;

All subscriptions are automatically managed by the ChangeNotificationWrapper when items are added or removed from the collection.

Unsubscribing from events

When you are no longer interested in events from the source object, there are two options:

  1. Just leave them coming, as soon as the objects are no longer used, they will be garbage collected
  2.  Unsubscribe using the following code:
wrapper.UnsubscribeFromAllEvents();

Contributions

We would like to thank the following contributors:

Want to contribute to the documentation? We have a guide for that!


Questions

Have a question about Catel? Use StackOverflow with the Catel tag!